A State Department official accepted free flights to Las Vegas with exotic dancers, expensive meals, hotel rooms in New York and other bribes to speed up the visa process for a jewelry company, federal prosecutors said Friday. Michael John O'Keefe, the deputy nonimmigrant visa chief at the U.S. Consulate in Toronto, was indicted on bribery and conspiracy charges Friday. Sunil Agrawal, the chief executive of New York-based STS Jewels, was also charged. Agrawal sent O'Keefe the names of employees who needed visas to work for her company, prosecutors said, and O'Keefe scheduled them outside the normal visa process. O'Keefe did his best to make sure he conducted the interviews and awarded 21 visas to STS employees, according to an indictment unsealed Friday. ... http://www.guardian.co.uk

Ryanair is to sue the UK government for £3.3m for losses it says it incurred because of tighter aviation security. Ryanair gave the government a one-week deadline to normalise the procedures introduced following the foiling of an alleged plot to bomb airliners. Passengers are limited to taking one small piece of hand luggage, and are being subjected to frequent searches. Ryanair boss Michael O'Leary called the measures "a shambles". The government said the airline had no legal grounds. Dublin-based Ryanair said it would give the proceeds to charity. "It is a shambles and a cock-up and we are giving terrorists and extremists a victory," Mr O'Leary said. "The government has, two weeks after the events of 10 August, still failed to get UK security back to normal." ...http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/5285102.stm

U.S. tanks shelled a mosque in the Sunni insurgent stronghold of Ramadi on Friday after coming under rocket-propelled grenade and machinegun fire from the building, the U.S. military said. A doctor at Ramadi hospital told Reuters three people had been killed and 22 wounded by the U.S. fire, which the U.S. military said was provoked by a "complex attack" that also included hand grenades and improvised explosives. "Coalition forces returned fire in self defense, using escalation of force procedures, and finally fired several main gun rounds from M1 tanks into the mosque in order to defeat the attackers," the military said in a statement. The mosque suffered serious structural damage to the dome and minaret, it said, adding that one soldier had been slightly hurt in the attack. U.S. forces generally refrain from damaging religious buildings but say they will attack them if fired upon. They accuse militants from both Sunni and Shi'ite factions of using mosques for military purposes...http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=2356639

Venice is on course to become a city virtually without residents within the next 30 years, turning it into a sort of Disneyland - teeming with holidaymakers but devoid of inhabitants. Depopulation is getting to the point of no return, the Venice council housing chief, Mara Rumiz, said following the publication this week of the latest figures. "Beyond then, Venice will never again be a normal city, but will become a mere tourist destination and lose its charm - even for the tourists themselves," she was quoted as telling the daily La Repubblica today. The register of residents, tallied every 10 years, shows that the population of Venice proper has almost halved - from 121,000 to 62,000 - since the great flood of 1966. A city that once ruled an empire now has a smaller population than Herne Bay and, if it continues to lose full-time inhabitants at the same rate, it will be "empty" by around 2046...http://www.guardian.co.uk/italy/story/0,,1858624,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=12

Deadly storms swept across the northern Plains, bringing tornadoes that ripped roofs off houses and hail that smashed car windshields. In Missouri, most of the Jefferson City area lost power for about two hours as the storms continued Friday.A day earlier, a man died after a tornado hit his home in Minnesota, while in Wisconsin, lightning apparently struck a woman as she left a supermarket. Hundreds of cows were killed or were on the loose. Twisters, heavy rain and hail as big as grapefruit also struck the Dakotas, stripping trees of their leaves, and power was knocked out around the region.Also Thursday, a flash flood in New Mexico killed a man and a boy driving on a tribal road in New Mexico....http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,210413,00.html

Washington says the Venezuelan authorities have illegally seized and searched a diplomatic bag destined for the US embassy in Caracas. The Venezuelan authorities say they were looking for military hardware being flown in illegally from the US. But an embassy spokesman said this was nonsense and a serious violation of international rules. The US state department has made a formal complaint to the government, demanding the bag be returned to them. Venezuela's foreign ministry told the BBC that a piece of luggage belonging to the US naval attache had been seized but they stressed it was not, as it were, an official diplomatic bag. A ministry official said they were alerted to three lorries leaving the airport compound without reporting to customs as required by law. ...http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/5284260.stm